With data speeds powering unprecedented rapid growth, billing management and automation solutions are an inevitable investment regardless of your ERP of choice. NetSuite users in particular have a wide range of third-party choices that can enhance automation opportunities and extend its native capabilities.
However, while the right product can be a game changer that elevates every aspect of your business, the wrong one can burn capital, frustrate your people and leave you struggling to keep up with the competition. Here’s what every NetSuite user should look for in a billing automation tool, as well as a few insights about top companies that cracked the code.
Understanding ERP billing limitations
Every NetSuite user will be familiar with the classic Excel spreadsheets and hours of manual work that go into bridging the gaps between CRMs, payment gateways and other data sources. Over half of accounts payable teams are only partially automated, and 4 out of 5 are still keying invoices into their accounting systems by hand.
That’s why the majority of financial leaders are targeting automation investments, but here’s the catch: it’s not always clear how to do it or what’s possible within your ERP.
In fact, many missteps and inefficient solutions occur because the full range of benefits an integration can deliver aren’t entirely understood. To ensure the choice you make today for your NetSuite instance delivers maximum ROI in the future and capitalizes on emerging tech trends, keep the following principles in mind:
- Billing management integrations should automate the entire billing cycle, not just individual processes.
- Solutions should add value to every department, not just a single team. (Security, compliance, revenue recognition, etc.)
- Investments should make your business growth-ready in addition to addressing today’s pain points.
- The best choices will work within your ERP’s native environment rather than as a standalone with its own learning curve.
- Success and complexity go hand-in-hand – your software should anticipate future scaling challenges.
- Data speed is the measure of success today. Any product you choose must deliver real-time data streams for users across the business.
By evaluating your O2C cycle with these concepts in mind, you’ll be able to identify where automation can make the biggest impact and how processes interrelate. Critically, any solution you choose should eliminate manual bottlenecks rather than distribute them elsewhere in the business.
Key benefits a billing automation tool should deliver
There are many NetSuite solutions available for CFOs and controllers who want to extend its out-of-the-box billing capabilities, but the true standouts will solve many challenges at once and point toward future functionality you’re anticipating down the line. Here are the main areas businesses can improve through automation in their billing cycle.
Error reduction
42% of companies report significant revenue leakage according to a recent study by MGI, and those that rely on manual processes are 20% more likely to experience losses of 5% or more. Worse, these errors are distributed throughout the business and consume valuable time and resources to repair.
Automation can eliminate manual errors entirely by leveraging clean data streams from all your systems, improving key metrics like days sales outstanding (DSO) and minimizing revenue leakage.
Speed and efficiency
In a Q4 2024 report by Accenture, 87% of businesses surveyed expect 5% growth or higher for their global operations in 2025. The speed and efficiency AI and automation deliver are driving forces behind their outlook, with 52% making “significant” investments in these areas.
Rapid expansion can strain manual workflows that aren’t designed to scale quickly – especially as businesses mature out of the startup phase. Lattice, a leading people management platform, discovered this firsthand as their insufficiently integrated O2C systems struggled to scale, leading to extended billing cycles, errors and major resource burdens for billing and revenue.
Contract complexity
Growth and acquisition introduce complexity to contracts, and manual processes quickly become a nightmare for accounts receivable (AR) without automation support. NetSuite AR automation solutions that integrate your CRM and ERP can drastically reduce days sales outstanding (DSO) by streamlining the following billing processes:
- Contract modifications
- Recurring charges
- Tax calculations
- Tracked usage
- Invoicing and invoice creation
These issues can quickly overwhelm your team, and solutions should close manual gaps and preserve a NetSuite-based workflow to minimize disruptions.
Revenue recognition and compliance
56% of AP teams spent over 10 hours per week on manual invoice processing alone, and in many cases, this is because billing and revenue recognition are treated as separate processes. Software solutions should support automated workflows between billing and revenue throughout the O2C cycle and should be considered early and often when designing your core tech stack.
Also, ASC 606 regulations have dramatically increased the data complexity businesses have to manage, as code intelligence platform developer Sourcegraph is well aware. After a period of explosive growth, their manual strategies for ASC 606 compliance consumed days of productivity every month and distracted their team from important work.
Selecting your billing management automation solution
There are several third-party billing management solutions available to NetSuite users today, and many of them are specifically designed to address a particular challenge your business may be facing. However, to maximize ROI, companies need to take a broad view of the impact a billing automation tool can deliver.
You can use Zone & Co’s ROI Calculator to evaluate where and how automation could be valuable for your company, and here are some important advantages NetSuite users should look for from any solution they choose.
Full NetSuite integration
Standalone apps can be powerful tools, but they often require billing and finance teams to learn new workflows that include juggling multiple logins. Native SuiteApps are much faster to onboard and reduce learning curves by keeping everything within your team’s preferred environment.
Data synchronization
NetSuite users who work with Salesforce are already familiar with the communication limitations between these two platforms. Integrations like ZoneBilling deliver a seamless flow of data between your CRM and ERP, allowing for optimized billing management automation strategies.
This is precisely how Sourcegraph was able to achieve a 70% reduction in revenue recognition time by implementing ZoneBilling, a native SuiteApp by Zone & Co that effortlessly connects NetSuite with data sources across the O2C cycle. By linking their CRM and ERP, they were able to eliminate their traditional manual billing workarounds that contributed to compliance difficulties.
“Revenue recognition and billing had become super manual, particularly after implementing ASC 606 processes. With our growth in our customer base, we urgently needed a more automated billing solution for NetSuite.” – Samantha Ulrich-Herman, Accounting Manager at Sourcegraph
Adaptability
Rapid growth rates mean today’s billing automation investments need to be extremely flexible. Solutions should offer high degrees of customization and be constantly updated by developers to extend core systems far into the future.
Telecom firm Devoli’s outdated systems faced scaling, security and integration hurdles with their NetSuite instance during rapid expansion. "The financial systems we had supporting a $12 million revenue business were not suitable for the ~$100 million revenue business we are today," explained Devoli CFO Blair Woodbury.
By implementing ZoneBilling, Devoli was able to integrate its legacy systems while maintaining its preferred NetSuite and Salesforce environments. This unlocked scalable automated workflows that were easy to implement and reduced billing time by 80%.
Contract flexibility
One of the most difficult growth and scaling challenges is managing contract modifications for subscriptions, use-based billing and other customizable billing models. Not only should a solution be capable of solving current issues, but it should address anticipated complexity with ease.
This is precisely the problem Lattice ran into when their subscription complexity grew rapidly and overwhelmed their manual billing process. With ZoneBilling, they connected all their systems for enhanced automation to achieve a 90% increase in billing efficiency.
“The complexity of our deals was too much for our billing system, so we had to use spreadsheets for accurate tracking. This significantly increased our manual workload.” – Lakshman Manoharan, Head of Business Systems at Lattice
Optimal billing automation with ZoneBilling
While there are many third-party billing solutions available for NetSuite users, most enable only partial automation for billing or require compromises on functionality and preferred software environment. In fact, many simply push manual bottlenecks downstream, so they don’t really solve the problem at all.
ZoneBilling is a native SuiteApp for NetSuite users that extends its powerful out-of-the-box capabilities across the entire O2C cycle. It seamlessly connects your CRM to NetSuite to accelerate invoice creation and delivery and optimize your DSO entirely within your NetSuite instance. ZoneBilling also delivers unprecedented flexibility and customization of invoicing and contract modifications, completely replacing inefficient rip-and-replace strategies and manual processes with highly scalable automated workflows.
Zone’s suite of automation tools can enhance efficiency across your business as well. By optimizing NetSuite’s billing and invoicing, it provides clean data streams to your finance team to enhance revenue recognition, compliance and security. In combination with ZoneReporting, you’ll be able to quickly generate valuable reports using data in business intelligence tools like PowerBI.
Best automation tool for a subscription SaaS business – a NetSuite and ZoneBilling success story
Tech Soft 3D, a company specializing in software development kits for visualization tools, is a classic example of the importance of seeking billing automation solutions that serve all aspects of their business. After a period of sustained growth, Tech Soft 3D’s royalty-based fee structure that varied with usage proved too complex for their current level of billing automation. This also affected their ability to forecast revenue for budget planning, meet compliance obligations and unlock insights into customer behavior.
“Our team spent at least two full business days every quarter just to send invoices,” Tech Soft 3D Business Services Manager David White, explained. “We were stuck in a cycle of administrative tasks that deflected us from our core roles.”
Their strategy? Pursue a 100% automated subscription-based billing solution that streamlined accounts receivable entirely within NetSuite. And there was only one software on the market capable of meeting all their needs: ZoneBilling.
ZoneBilling allowed their team to endlessly create, customize and deliver subscriptions for each customer contract directly through NetSuite. They now save 24 business days a year through automation and simplified subscription management and benefit from automated audit compliance, enhanced billing, deeper customer visibility and optimized forecasting and budgeting.
“After finding out about ZoneBilling, everything felt as if the sky opened up and sunlight was coming through and we could see the light at the end of the tunnel.” – David White, Business Services Manager at Tech Soft 3D
Start exploring ZoneBilling by Zone & Co today
To find out what ZoneBilling can do for your business, schedule a personalized demo with the ZoneBilling team today. If you’d like to learn more in the meantime, Zone & Co offers resources like the ROI calculator, or you can explore the ZoneBilling product demo at your own pace.
Finally, ZoneBilling is regularly updated with new features to ensure your systems are always on the cutting edge of emerging strategies and trends. You can find out about the newest updates with the ZoneBilling AI assistant, or visit the ZoneBilling Knowledge base to learn about specific release notes.
